Harold Washington`s Time

The First Black Mayor Of Chicago, Seen Through A Racial Prism

March 08, 1992|By Reviewed by Ed Marciniak, president of the Institute of Urban Life at Loyola University, Chicago.

Fire on the Prairie:

Chicago`s Harold Washington and the Politics of Race

By Gary Rivlin

Holt, 442 pages, $24.95

Two schools of thought claim to understand Chicago`s rambunctious political history. The first contends that race explains it all. The second approach was summed up in the 1980s by a black ward committeeman: ``If race and politics compete in a tug-of-war at city hall, you can bet your bottom dollar that politics will come first.`` Upfront, let it be said that Gary Rivlin, author of ``Fire on the Prairie,`` fraternizes with the first school, while I hobnob with the second.

To justify his appraisal of the 1983 mayoral elections, Rivlin highlights the eight white Democratic committeemen who deserted their party in the general election to endorse the Republican candidate, Bernard Epton, after Harold Washington had outdistanced Richard M. Daley and Mayor Jane Byrne in the primary. When ``a challenger finally toppled the machine,`` Rivlin writes, ``no one seemed to notice . . . the last great bastion of nineteenth century urban politics had fallen, but what people reported on was the color of the man who kicked it over and the hatred on the faces of those opposing him. Such was the power of race in Chicago and everywhere.``

For Rivlin, ``Byrne herself was not above naked racial ploys.`` As mayor, Byrne initiated a monthly publication called City Edition. In February 1983, however, there were two versions. ``The one passed out to South- and West-Side residents ran page-one articles about black history month and the appointment of a black woman to head the library. There was no mention of black history month in the `City Edition` passed around predominantly white communities, and news of the library appointment was relegated to page three. Blacks graced the front page of the black oriented edition and whites the front page of the other. Both editions, however, referred to Byrne`s `One Chicago` vision.``

He cites Alderman Edward Vrdolyak telling a meeting of precinct captains, ``Don`t kid yourself. . . (This) has become a racial thing. . .`` Last but not least, there was the Washington campaign`s refrain, ``It`s our turn now.`` What is singular about ``Fire on the Prairie`` is its revealing vignettes of Washington`s early supporters. Among them were black nationalists, coalition builders and disaffected Democrats, but no elected officials. Many of these profiles first appeared in the Reader, a Chicago weekly for which Rivlin covered city hall.

Rivlin`s accounts of campaign intrigue and in-fighting are original and noteworthy. Nobody has better chronicled how the Washington camp successfully rejected Jesse Jackson`s repeated overtures to take over, or take credit for, Washington`s election campaign. On the other hand, unsupported generalizations abound. Typical is Rivlin`s statement that ``innumerable times blacks supported a white candidate over a serious black challenger, and how rare it was for the opposite to occur.`` In a published survey conducted in 1987, I found 39 black officials who had won their offices in political constituencies where non-blacks were solidly in the majority-at the city, county and state levels.

Washington`s political entourage did not emerge as a rainbow coalition until after his mayoral victory. In the beginning, according to Rivlin, some of Washington`s backers ``saw themselves as part of a black liberation movement and others as part of an antimachine crusade. Still others were drawn to the campaign of a candidate to the left of the liberal. . . . When slighted, each faction figured the blame must rest elsewhere . . . but certainly not with Washington. Only (he) prevented the campaign from collapsing under the weight of its differences.``

Only after the 1983 general election, which gave Washington the mayoralty by 46,000 votes out of 1.3 million ballots, was it possible to speak-somewhat generously-of a rainbow coalition. With an unprecedented 98 percent of a huge black vote, Washington garnered the additional votes he desperately needed from Hispanics, lakefront independents so-called and ethnic voters from the neighborhoods on the city`s Northwest and Southwest Sides. Each of these groups could now claim to have swung the election for him.

Rivlin underappreciates the political priorities of Washington`s second term. In his inauguration address in 1987, the re-elected mayor called upon supporters and opponents alike to ``lower our voices.`` Afterwards, he began exploring ways to bring his political crusade, at full strength, back into the Democratic Party.